


EGGS?!

by lalaietha



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 04:28:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/605817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hiccup wasn't expecting that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	EGGS?!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [billtheradish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/billtheradish/gifts).



When you get right down to it, Astrid really does like Hiccup. She likes him a lot. He's got a lot of sterling qualities and he's even mostly a good sort-of-maybe-possibly-someday-we-need-to-actually-talk-about-this boyfriend. And, very importantly, he's the reason she has Crabby as a companion, and being able to ride an acid-spitting dragon is nothing to be sneezed at. 

Still, she actually has to remind herself of all of this when she opens the door to find him standing there in his nightshirt with his hair plastered to his head. Among other things, he'd banged long and hard enough on the door that he'd woken Aunt Thornskull and Astrid'll hear about it in the morning. At length. 

Maybe she'll finish the night out in Crabby's shed with the dragon, instead. 

Before she can rip a strip off him, thought, Hiccup blurts out, "There's something wrong with Toothless, I need you to come help me." And it's sort of like watching a wheel roll up a hill and hit that point where it loses momentum, except it's inside her head. 

As the mind-wheel falls back down, she thinks, _Why do you think I'll be able to do anything you can't?_ and also _Will you look at the weather?_ and _Why is it always_ me _, Hiccup?_ but what she says out loud is a sighed, "Fine. Okay. Let me get my rain-cape." 

"But it's - " Hiccup starts and then stops when she shoots him a glare. 

"I am _getting_ my _rain-cape_ ," she repeats, so Hiccup shuts up and just fidgets with the door handle until she's got it and she's pulled on her boots and put her hood up and only _then_ does she follow him out into the rain. 

As they walk she does say out loud, "I'm not gonna know what's going on any better than you do, you know that," having to speak up a bit over the wind and the rain. Hiccup flails his hands. His gait is a little off, which probably means he didn't put his foot on properly when he got out of bed. 

"Worry shared is worry halved?" he says. 

"Try again without the question mark," she grumbles and then has to grumble it louder when Hiccup yells, "What?" because the wind picks up. "What's the problem, anyway?" 

"Obviously I don't know," Hiccup shouts back. "I mean, he hasn't been eating properly for a while and then tonight he dragged my mattress in front of the fire and he's curled up on it and won't move and he keeps growling at me whenever I try to come near, but I can see that he's, like, trembling and shaking like something's really wrong. I came to get you because I figured you might be smarter enough than me to see something I'm missing." 

Astrid glances at him; his face is set and grim and it doesn't sound like that last bit is a self-deprecating joke. Which is inexplicably warming: she gets "pretty" a lot and "deadly" occasionally, but not a lot of people go out of their way to tell her she's smart. "I'll look, but I dunno, Hiccup." 

"It's times like this I wish we had elder dragon experts to go ask about stuff," Hiccup says and Astrid laughs a little bitterly. 

"We're going to _be_ the elder dragon-keepers people go to, Hiccup," she says. "We get to learn things the hard way." 

"I hate the hard way," Hiccup gripes as they take the steps to his house and he pushes the door open. "The hard way sucks." 

"Too bad," Astrid says, lowering her voice and pushing her hood back. Stoick isn't here - the whole fleet is out fishing - so it's just them in here. That's probably for the best. Things might be better between father and son, but Astrid can just _imagine_ what Stoick would be like right now. She glances at Hiccup and says, "Go change into something dry, you're dripping all over the floor. No, seriously," she says as Hiccup looks like he's going to argue, "go change, I can see through your nightshirt." 

_That_ works. Hiccup goes a bit pink and hurries away in the direction of his clothes-chest while Astrid undoes her cape, hangs it over one of the sword-racks to drip off and heads towards the glow of the fire. 

Along the way she stops a few times to light some more lamps. Typical Hiccup, he'd been trying to work more or less in the dark. It wasn't like oil or tallow was in anywhere near as short supply these days and it wasn't like this didn't count as enough of an emergency to spend a little even if they _had_ been, but no. That's not Hiccup. 

Astrid sort of avoids looking at Toothless until she's got the last of the lamps and candles lit. Then she picks up one of the bigger hand-lamps and sort of inches closer to the fire, lifting the lamp up so that she can see better. Then, when the light falls on the black dragon, she stops and stares for a while. 

Part of her wonders if Hiccup just missed it because he was too busy panicking and not turning the light on. Then again, he'd've been gone long enough to get all the way to her house on the other side of the village, pound on the door until she woke up, and then for them to get all the way back here. That's probably enough time. 

There's the sound of Hiccup's mechanical foot on the wood floor, and it sounds like he took the time to put it on properly while he was changing. As he gets to her he says, "See? You see how he's all - "

"She," Astrid corrects him, almost absently, still staring at the vision in front of her. Hiccup babbles to a stop that way he does. 

"What?" he manages, and now he's standing right beside her, peering over her arm. Toothless looks up at them and gives a little warning show of teeth just to tell them not to come too close to the obviously precious things she's curled around. 

"'She'," Astrid repeats. "Not he, Hiccup. 'He' isn't all anything. Those are _eggs_ Toothless is curled around. It's 'she'." 

"I," says Hiccup. "He," says Hiccup. "But - " says Hiccup. "I don't," says Hiccup, and finally, " _What?_ " says Hiccup. 

"Look," Astrid says patiently, pulling over a bench so she can put the lamp on it, "I know we don't know _all_ that much about dragon anatomy yet, but those are _eggs_. Toothless just laid _eggs_. Like, four of them. Things that lay eggs aren't called 'he'. They're 'she'. They're female." 

Hiccup stares at the black shape curled up on his mattress, the fire painting light and shadow on its - her - curved back. His mouth opens and closes and he manages to squeak, "Toothless is a _girl_?" before opening and closing his mouth again like a stranded fish. 

Astrid narrows her eyes and puts her fists on her hips, not totally liking that tone and figuring she should cut that off right now. "Excuse me," she says, making her voice hard. "Is there something _wrong_ with being? Is there a _problem_ with Toothless being a girl?" 

Hiccup looks at her with wide eyes and frantically shakes his head and waves his hands, palm-forward. "No!" he squawks. "No, no, no no no! Of course not! No! There are no problems here! Noooo, no problems, why, why would there be any problems?" 

Toothless raises _her_ head a little from her slightly slimy and wet-looking eggs and tilts it to the side. She makes an inquiring little noise, looking from Astrid to Hiccup and back again. 

"I don't know," Astrid tells the dragon. "Don't look at me, he's the one being weird." 

"I am not being weird!" Hiccup protests. "There is no weirdness here, I'm fine! I just . . . " he waves his hand towards Toothless. "I wasn't expecting that." He starts to lean closer, and then backs off again with his hands raised when Toothless starts to growl. "Okay!" he says. "Okay. Nooot coming anywhere near the eggs. Your eggs! I'm not touching the eggs." 

Toothless settles back down. Then she starts licking at the eggs, which Astrid thinks seems kind of gross, and making happy little cooing noises at them like nothing Astrid's ever heard out of a dragon before. Or Hiccup, from the weirded-out look on his face. The eggs themselves are, well, egg-like: oval and sort of off-white, although they look soft and leathery like snake-eggs rather than hard and brittle like chicken eggs. Toothless seems pretty happy with them, so presumably they're okay. Not that Astrid or Hiccup would be able to tell. 

Hiccup's still flailing his hands around like he does when his brain is running around in circles and only half in contact with his mouth. "But," he says, and then, " _how?_ I mean, I know how eggs are generally produced," he says, with a glance at Astrid like he's trying to cut off a sarcastic comment, where Astrid is actually totally wondering the same thing. "But he - I mean, she, can't even really go much of anywhere without me and I haven't seen him, I mean her, even giving the time of day to any other dragons, and - " 

Astrid shrugs, sitting down on one of the benches. "Who knows? Hiccup, we can't even tell which dragons are male or female from the outside. I'd kind of thought maybe they were really like a beehive and the big monster one was the only female or something." She shrugs again. "Obviously not." 

Hiccup frowns at her, giving her a long look. "Good thing, too," he says. "Because then the whole species would have been doomed." 

"Yeah, I wasn't going to bring it up until I had some evidence," Astrid admits. "It was kind of depressing, as a theory. Besides." She gestures to Toothless. "Obviously it's wrong." She frowns, now, thoughtful. "We should let everyone else know about how Toothless was acting, so they know to just look out for eggs." She peers at them. "I wonder if they're all going to be Night Furies? I mean, we've never even seen another Night Fury. Maybe the different kinds of dragons are more, like, whether or not someone has brown hair or gets really tall." 

"I guess we'll find out," Hiccup says after a moment of his own thought. He gets up and rummages around at his little desk before hauling his Gigantic Unofficial Book of Dragon-Keeping out and flipping it open to a new page. He starts to scribble stuff down. "Sorry I got you up, I guess." 

"No, this is cool," Astrid says, staring long and hard at the eggs again. "Besides, this way I know what's going on if Crabby gets weird." 

Toothless snorts softly, the way she always seems to when Astrid mentions Crabby or, for that matter, Toothless sees Crabby. She always feels a bit defensive about that: okay, sure, Crabby's obviously not as smart as Toothless is and can actually be a little bit of a scaredy cat and clearly acknowledges Toothless as boss - well, queen, Astrid supposes - dragon, but he (or possibly she, who knew now?)'s still a good buddy and always willing to do what Astrid wants. 

She sticks her tongue out at Toothless, who noses one of the eggs around to a minutely different position and seems to pretend she's ignoring Astrid now. 

Astrid rolls her eyes and cocks her head, listening. "It sounds like it's even worse out there now," she says, making a decision. "Go find me some blankets, Hiccup, I'm going to crash here for a while." 

It only takes about twenty minutes and a minimum of Hiccup flailing and blushing before Astrid's wrapped up in a feather comforter and a fur, using one of the benches as a place to sleep. It's not the most comfortable thing ever, and Hiccup tried to offer the bed - but Astrid pointed out that a) he was missing his mattress now anyway and b) she'd slept on the ground and on stone while she'd been in training for Dragon Training, so a bench was just fine.

Toothless's egg-coos are kind of soothing; as she's almost asleep, Astrid reflects that at least this way, Aunt Thornskull might have lost interest in yelling by the time Astrid gets home.

*****

The eggs become the talk of the village, although almost nobody gets to see them. Toothless lets Hiccup pretty close, Astrid pretty close, grudgingly lets Stoick use his own house when he gets back from the sea, lets Ruffnut close enough to see, and aims little blasts of fire at anyone else who comes in view.

Tuffnut complains bitterly about this huge unfairness and how everyone always likes his sister better even though she's a total loser until Astrid calmly informs him that if he doesn't shut up she's going to throw him headfirst off the cliff. Then he just sulks. He's not alone there, Snotlout joining him in resentment of the deep unfairness of it all. But since sulking is _quiet_ , Astrid doesn't point out that between them, they've fallen off of more dragons than Astrid can conveniently count, accidentally stepped on wing membrane more than three times, broken claws on the wee ones through not paying attention and frankly, she wouldn't let either of them anywhere near anything as fragile as young offspring _either_. 

Fishlegs is a bit disappointed, but mostly excited as he turns Hiccup's scribbled and near incomprehensible notes into the Gigantic Official Book of Dragon-Keeping. It helps that his brother's teaching him how to bind and rebind books, so he can put in a quire here or there when he needs pages, or take the thing apart and rebind it when something needs to get updated or erased. 

He's the one who offers the theory that dragons are like snakes, "who sort of, like, store the . . . stuff from mating until they think it's the right time to have eggs," he says, blushing a little bit at the idea of talking about dragon-sex. Snotlout stares at him. 

"How do you even know that?" he asks, speaking for pretty much all of them even if Astrid might have found a less disgusted way of saying it. Fishlegs shrugs. 

"I had snakes when I was a kid," he says. "And if they died from something like a house collapse or my dad stepping on them, I'd dissect'em so I knew how they worked. Gorma the Ugly helped me figure some of it out." 

Everyone sort of nods, even if Snotlout and the twins make faces at the idea of willingly spending time with Gorma the Ugly, who smells like fish even if she does know how everything inside animals works and is pretty much willing to help. She's too nervous to help much with the dragons, though; she says old habits die hard, and since a dragon-attack did kind of kill her husband and her son, nobody really bugs her much about it. 

"Anyway, that's what some snakes do. Maybe dragons do it too. Or maybe they're hermaphrodites." He beams at them, and Astrid decides to change the subject and not even ask what that means. It's not that she doesn't like Fishlegs. It's just that some of the things he's enthusiastic about are kind of . . . weird, and others are kind of . . . gross. 

He also guessed that Toothless's unwillingness to let people close had to do with whether they themselves were male or female as much as anything else. "I mean, Hiccup is Hiccup," he says, "and his dad kind of lives there so she sort of has to put up with it, but otherwise it's just Astrid and Ruffnut and, to be fair, Ruffnut breaks just as much stuff as her brother." It's just him and Hiccup and Astrid sitting on Hiccup's front porch right now, eating some toasted cheese and drinking small beer. "We haven't really tried any of the other women but I'd bet she'd let them stand in the doorway, close enough to see, just like Ruffnut." 

"I think we'll leave the experiment for some other time," Hiccup says, wryly. "Dad's still a little put out about the scorch-marks from the last time Tuffnut decided to give it another try." 

"I think Tuffnut's still a little put out about those, too," Fishlegs agrees. Astrid rolls her eyes. 

"His own fault," she says, blunt. "I told him not to." 

"You know," Fishlegs adds, thoughtfully, "it might get pretty exciting if they _are_ all baby Night Furies. You know, them trying out their fire, sparking all over the place." 

Hiccup gives him a blank look. "Thank you," he says, flatly. "I really needed to think about that." 

"Better to think about it now than later?" Fishlegs offers; Hiccup puts his face in his hands. Astrid pats him on the back. 

"Better go bug Gobber and start designing some fire-protection for everything below waist-height, oh mechanical genius," she tells him, and he groans.

*****

On the basis that Aunt Thornskull is happier when she's out of the house anyway, Astrid spends a lot of time at Hiccup's, at least after his dad is back and can be a chaperone. Although considering that he avoids the room with Toothless in it as much as possible, he's not much of one. As time goes on, Toothless lets Hiccup and Astrid get closer and closer, until about three weeks after laying the eggs she lets Astrid touch one with a look of gracious forbearance like a tolerant queen. The egg is warm, as leathery as it looks, and feels like it's not quite full of water.

"Weird," she says, as she takes her hand back and Toothless looks the egg over carefully to make sure Astrid didn't hurt it. "They must be going to hatch soon." 

Hiccup nods and wraps his arm around his knees, rocking back and forth a bit. "I am so not ready for four more dragons," he eventually blurts out. Astrid shrugs. 

"We weren't ready for any dragons last year," she says. "We'll figure it out."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] EGGS?!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1383307) by [lalaietha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)




End file.
